sophie cooper & julian bradley The Blow Volume 3 (MC, £7.95)

label: Front and Follow

Bradley and Cooper approached creating their submission to ‘The Blow’ series with the cassette format very much in mind, collaborating fully on each track throughout the album by means of file sharing. The duo had the concept of weaving pieces together both in the sense of musically flowing the tracks into one another and by reintroducing motifs and imagery throughout the entire album. As such, the recordings are intended to be played as two distinct sides of a tape, rather than hearing the tracks individually on the digital version. Julian Bradley is a founder member of Vibracathedral Orchestra, solo as The Piss Superstition, in Never Rad with Luke Poot, and a past member of The Negative Kite. His sound has been described as music that's eroded and smeared until its original content is obliquely hinted at or lost. In collaboration with Sophie Cooper, a musician interested in reimagining the conventions of song writing through incorporation of drones, weird noises and alternative vocal approaches (and collaborator with Delphine Dora and United Bible Studies), the duo have created a series of pieces where fuzztone and feedback patterns pulsate, sweet vocal lines play with repetition and a sense of maximalism is achieved. In 2016 Supernormal Festival commissioned Sophie Cooper to create a new duo work for performance and her first choice for collaborator was Julian Bradley. The commission was successful and Bradley / Cooper choose to continue the duo beyond this live performance, and are now a permanent collaboration under the name ‘The Slowest Lift’.
Tracklisting (Side A) 1.Love Letters 2.Greenhead 3.And And And And 4.Wish Me To Forget You 5.The Body (Side B) 6.Nowhere From The Water To Go 7.Smoke On The Phone In The Street 8.Congratulations 9.My Muscles 10.The Mirror